Within a particular group, community, or other social or societal body, ensuring that important information reaches all of the right people precisely at the right time remains a crucial challenge, particularly where the body is working under time pressure, is operating within a competitive market, or where business-critical information is undergoing rapid change, as often occurs in large scale corporate environments.
Within social and societal bodies, business and professional relationships and networking are increasingly influenced and driven by unilateral and bi-directional electronic channels of communication, such as electronic mail (“email”), text messaging, online discussion forums, regular and micro Web logging, Web news feeds, and linked-in Web content. Despite advances in ways to increase the immediacy of electronic communications, information may still fail to reach those individuals who have important or urgent information needs due to poorly timed or completely missed message delivery, or because an action, such opening a calendar and highlighting a particular day, failed to occur.
Similarly, within the corporate setting, users are at times requested to complete surveys and other requests for information. Information requests include opinion polls, work performance questionnaires, project reviews, and the like. These requests are not always circulated at times when most effective collection of information may occur. For instance, the users may be tied-up with other work, or find the information requested redundant or cumulative to information previously provided. The challenge of both timing information dissemination and collection for optimal effect and efficiency increases with the sophistication and complexity of the social bodies involved and of the underlying activities, such as ensuring consistency in and quality of business practices with global customers, despite differences in time zone, geography, culture, customs, and language.
Several situations may arise that result in mistimed or failed message delivery. For instance, a message may fail to be delivered to the correct recipients. In a large company, for example, the appropriate communication channels for each employee with a need-to-know may be unknown to a message sender. Indifferently sending a message to former employees is ineffective, while newly-hired or transferred employees may unwittingly be left off recipient lists. Similarly, a message sender may be unaware of the scope of business divisions within which to send a communication for a particular topic and may inadvertently miss work groups who have an interest in the underlying information. Despite the message sender's best intentions, the message omits those work groups as recipients and the opportunity to ensure that important and urgent information needs are met is lost.
As well, message or survey delivery alone, even when provided to all or most of the potential recipients who respectively share a need for or provide a source of the underlying information, cannot guarantee effective or appropriate usage or provisioning of the information conveyed or sought. For instance, a message that arrives too early, possibly long before the message is actually needed, may be read, filed away with other messages, and subsequently deleted, re-filed, or forgotten, unless the recipient takes separate action to set up a reminder or other trigger to occur at some future point in time closer to when the information becomes germane. Similarly, at the time of message arrival, a message recipient may be working on another project or be distracted by other activities, thereby inadvertently ignoring or miscategorizing the message. Finally, a message that arrives too late may completely miss a deadline or an opportunity for taking action, and thus be of meager value to the recipient.
Accordingly, what is needed is an approach to delivering communications, requesting information, and, more generally, taking various actions within an organization, as well as delivering messages to a set of people determined dynamically by a set of rules. Communications, whether as outgoing messages or information requests, should be timed to arrive just-in-time, that is, when the communication has optimum potential for getting the attention of and to be of optimal usefulness to each recipient, as well as to the requester or sender.